Title: Dishpig and Snowball
Author: grayglube
Pairing/Character: Icegirl/Warren
Rating: M

Summary: Life turns out to be more than busing tables and thesis statements, more than dysfunctional behavior and cigarettes on school property, more than superheroes and villains. Comfort becomes like leftovers in the microwave: hot skin a cold center and a lot of steam. Icegirl/Warren

Spoilers/Warnings: None. Post-Movie

Chapter: 2 pt. 1

A/N: Thank you deadlybeautiful, Lauren, and stormandsins for reviewing they all left me with a smile.

December: Junior

Winter was a harsh and frigid bitch. Margo was a bitch when it was harsh and frigid. The universe had a tendency to balance out like that. She was huddled in layers: long johns, tank top, long sleeve thermal, sweater, winter parka, scarf, gloves, a hat with ear flaps, all the winter necessities.

Her jeans were tucked tightly into the salt and ice crusted snow boots on her feet, the boot on her left foot had a sole that was peeling away and let copious amounts of icy sludge soak into her sock. The knees on her jeans had wet circles on them from where she skidded and smashed them into the craggy icy pavement on her way out of the door. They felt swollen and she was sure they would be an ugly color combo of green and muted purple with little spots of red where the veins had popped on contact when she peeled her pants off later.

While she could survive at a temperature of something akin to -60 degrees because of her powers that didn’t mean she wouldn’t suffer through it, a lot like how kids had to suffer taking it up the ass for the first 18 years of life by something called school, they would live but that didn’t mean they had to enjoy getting figuratively sodomized by the school board.

She had three pairs of gloves on her left hand and on her right she had stripped them off to make snowballs and throw them in a pile twelve stairs below.

What was worse about the both pathetic and cold situation she was in was that the late bus was, of course, late and then, of course, the school locked its doors from the inside in the morning to make sure late students couldn’t get back in without getting caught and written up, which, of course, meant that when you left for the day after all the teachers left you were locked out. Indefinitely.

She didn’t really want to get home on time anyway because of her new houseguest who was less than a person and more sarcasm on legs with a Norwegian accent. Sure, she was stalling for excuses not to go home but that didn’t mean she had to be cold while she tried to think up elaborate escape plans and speedy getaways.

She had banged on the doors and kicked them until her toes felt like they were about to fall off and all she got was the kids who made faces at her and laughed at her misfortune and then acted like they would open the doors and instead faked her out.

Her ass was numb and the sound of a door opening shocked her into freezing the snowball to her hand. “Hold the door!” She rolled and her knees scrapped painfully on the ass-numbing steps. Her icecube hand slipped on the unsalted step and forced her chin into the skin scraping cement lip of the step above the one she sat on.

Her bottom lip split and the warm blood bubbled and congealed as quickly as it appeared. The sound of the door slamming shut again made her want to cry and smack someone with her icecube hand.

“Oh my god!”

“That looked painful.”

A third person snorted.

It was…

The flower child,

The school savior,

And smoky,

And they let the door shut.

Whatever inkling of tolerance she had for them slipped away like shit down a toilet. Her chin was scraped raw, her knees were quickly swelling to the size of cantaloupes, her butt was in the air, her lip was busted, and her hand was frozen in a 4 inch thick piece of ice.

“The bus is late, the doors lock from the inside, and it’s twenty-three degrees out and...-”

“Your hand is stuck in an icecube.”

“…yeah...”

She lifted her head off the step and cringed when she shifted her butt out of the air and her knees to the side. Layla’s face was far too close for comfort. “You’re bleeding.” Plant girl dug a tissue out of her bag and handed it to the blonde.   

“How are you cold?”

Will Stronghold was not as smart as he looked.

“Wouldn’t you be cold if your body temperature was thirty degrees below normal and you were stuck outside in…,” she gestured vaguely around her, “…this.” Her words were muffled from behind the tissue on her lip.

“Shouldn’t you be dead then?”

Warren Peace was equal parts sarcasm and asshole from his spot four stairs below.

“I imagine that my equivalent of right now would be your equivalent of how it would be if it was one-hundred and five outside, you can survive in it but it still feels god fucking awful.”

Margo notice Layla wince slightly at the bad language and added “Pardon my French,” to satisfy the eco-friendly fiend of good cheer and sunshine and hippies and the ozone layer.

“You should unfreeze your hand.” The other boy pointed to her frozen appendage and seated himself next to his girlfriend.

“I can’t, I’m too tired and I’m using them to accommodate my needs of not dying from cold exposure.”

The sound of someone’s bag scraping on ice made her look back to the hot head. His hand extended up to her and she placed the icecube of a hand attached to her arm under his. The ice melted into steam and as he went to turn around she made another snowball and placed it in his palm.

He melted it into water and she fought an urge to say ‘How cute.’

The door opened again, this time she didn’t bother to squeak out a plea to keep it open. In place of her turning around and risking another slip whoever came out managed to go sprawling and sliding on the ice. A human shaped purple blur went flying down the stairs along with a whirlwind of notebooks and math worksheets.

Magenta was about to break her face on the icy nasty sludgy steps. At the last possible midair moment she shifted and hit Warren Peace’s back with a loud thud. A ripping sound accompanied the smacking sound when her rodent teeth and nails caught on his thermal long sleeved shirt.

The shape shifter’s beady little eyes widened and she waddled back up the steps with little guinea pig legs right into Layla’s open palms. The pyro seethed and slowly smoked as his head turned to look over his shoulder at the giant hole in his shirt.

Will’s gulp was audible and Magenta’s rodent sounds softened in quiet and patient fear for the roasting that was almost imminent. His hands steamed and heat waves radiated in the frosty air around his individual digits.

Magenta hid under Layla’s bag and the hippie answered her silent plea for protection with a warning. “Warren, it was an accident.”

Her all American boyfriend jumped in to save the day. “Relax man, it’s just a shirt.”

Magenta shifted back when she noticed the steam dwindling down as the hot head fought for inner Zen or whatever that shit was called when one was calm inside. Layla’s bag sat stiffly atop Magenta’s now non-furry head and she shrugged it off. “Sorry, it’s the heels.”

Warren all but barred his teeth and growled at her.

The blonde watched the exchange and propped her head up on her now non frozen fist with her elbows resting on her swollen and frozen knees. “I’ve got a sewing kit in my bag.” She offered.

“What are you a girl scout?” The match stick bit out.

She rolled her eyes along with everyone else at his form of a thank you.

“Badly formed icicles rip my sleeves.”

Everyone at the top of the stairs behind her let out a collective sigh of relief from dodging being deep fried like KFC. Margo reached into her bag and fumbled with the zipper of the side pocket to yank out a cracked plastic box with oddly colored thread and a few assorted sized needles.

A conversation was struck up about the homework from everyone’s Villain Weaknesses class and the latest mishap in Save The Citizen. She herself banged her ass sliding down the steps to sit behind Peace after it was clear he wasn’t going to come to her.

Even when someone was going to be doing him a favor they’d have to come to him, he wasn’t really the type of guy to have it any way but his way. The brooding loner image got in the way.

She grinned wryly at the fact that while she was wearing enough layers for a normal person to climb a snow capped mountain in that his choice of apparel was a pair of old ratty jeans, a long sleeved red thermal rolled up to the elbow, and a pair of burned smoky smelling gloves.

A piece of fleece got caught in her mouth when she went to tear off the layers of gloves on her left hand with her teeth, she threw them inside out next to her. Her boots squeaked wetly when they plopped down on either side of his hips.

“Your going to have to scout back and bend over.” He threw her a scathing glance over his shoulder but did it any way while she searched for red thread.

Magenta and Will chortled over the way the request came out and Margo was fairly certain she heard Will mutter “That’s what she said.”

Her assumption was made positive when both Layla and Magenta ribbed him on either side under the lungs. He was winded in a loud and violent “Umph!”

With a half glance over her shoulder at the trio she turned back to the home ec. project at hand and muttered cautiously “I ain’t got red. I’ve got white and purple that’s it.”

“White.” He half grumbled it and half breathed the word back in wit a puff of billowy white breath.

 With her elbows on his shoulders and hunched over his moody little self she made uneven, shaky, and shivering stitches with her numb fingers. Layla helped Magenta slide around to gather the papers and notebooks that had spilled out of her hands when she went flying down the stairs.

They were mostly soggy and the ink was running but they were better than not having them at all, while they did that Margo berated herself internally for half thinking and utterly pining to rub the insides of her thighs and groin all over Warren Peace’s back.

The boy was practically a space heater and she was practically a piece of frozen rib eye. She piled lots of internal embarrassment and shame over the idea of grinding all over an unsuspecting boy as payment for tailoring his shirt just so she would get a grip on herself.

When she was finished she leaned in close and bit off the string from the spool. His back straightened up a second too early and smacked her in the mouth. Her hands went to her newly reopened split lip and her head bumped against the step behind her.

“Fuck you.”

He all but giggled at her expense. Magenta hobbled down in her death traps for shoes and seated herself next to the blonde. Margo clenched her watery eyes shut behind her glasses and winced. Magenta tapped her and held a pair of Advils in her hand.

Margo swallowed them down with a bite of a fresh snowball.

“Thanks.”

“You’d need a pair of floaties to wade through life without drowning on your own drool.”

“What a line, poptart.”

“Why are you still here?”

“I’ve got a mean old houseguest.”

“Ah, the elusive Margo Nansen’s family guests, if they’re like you I can see why you want to stay away.”

“How blunt you are.”

“That’s me, blunt as the caveman club.”

Warren turned to look at the two of them and then shifted to the left and slid up a step to sit next to Magenta. He was about to interrupt their conversation. He glanced at Margo and took one sadistically satisfied look at the way she shivered and the way her teeth clicked loudly together.

“Can I see those notebooks?” He asked Magenta.

“Uh, sure.” She passed over the pile and he threw them down the remaining steps where they hit the muddy ground. Magenta gaped openly. Warren’s mouth twitched upwards while he stepped down to the books and sat on the very first step up from the ground. He lit up the stack of wet notebooks, they hissed but otherwise ignited rather easily.

Layla smelt something burning. “Warren!”

“You’d think he’d get tired of that.” Will added and grabbed her arm to sit Layla back down before she got Warren less pleased with himself and more pissed off at them.

Magenta still gaped openly and then clicked her mouth shut. Then her own lips curved upward by a fraction.

“Cool. Bonfire.” Margo cooed and staggered down with a limping hobble, a slight reminiscence of walking. She plopped down on the cold, non icy patch on the ground because she couldn’t trust herself enough to saddle up to Peace without climbing on his shoulders for warmth and humping his head.

Magenta snickered. “Those were Zach’s.”

Everyone let out at least a chuckle over that, Will and the blonde, however, had full fledged fits.

Margo opened up her bag and pulled out a half empty pack of cigarettes. She offered one to Warren he took it and then held out a flaming fingertip for her to light hers on. She turned back to look up the stairs, “Magenta want one?”

“Ain’t gotta ask me twice.” Was her answer.

“If you guys have to do that, do you have to do it here, what if someone comes out?” Layla looked at them all disapprovingly.

“Everyone’s gone home, I think they’ll be safe.” Layla turned to glare at Will while Margo threw her pack and lighter up to Magenta.

The bang of the school door opening for a second time didn’t even earn a glance in its direction from anyone other than Magenta.

She perked up instantly and Margo noticed the way Layla gave her a knowing look, Magenta’s obvious attraction was just that, obvious, to everyone but her purple self.

“Hey Zach.”

“Yo. Did you get my notebooks out of your locker?”

“Yeah.” Magenta let out a cloud of smoke.

Zach opened his mouth to ask where they were but was distracted by the fire glowing at the bottom of the steps. “Cool, bonfire.” Margo snickered at his choice of words. “What’s with the powwow?”

The blonde met the fire-starter’s eyes and was confused when he lit up with a smile that for those who didn’t know him would assume was innocent and charismatic, and for those who did know him realized it meant some hard hitting shit was about to go down in a slightly sadistic matter.

When Zach sat down within inches of Warren’s warm body and punched him in the shoulder the pyro’s smile faltered and was replaced with a scowl.

“Those used to be your notebooks.” And he pointed at the small fire that was on it’s way out.

“Dude!” Zach started jumping up and down on the smoldering notebooks. “Snow queen can you put that out before he hurts himself?”

Margo lifted her head up away from the fuming figure of Zach to glare at Will and his smiling face that obviously thought that it was cool to call her ‘snow queen’ so casually.

It was more her ire for Will than any misplaced irritation reserved for Zach that made her ice up a little too much and incase Zach’s feet in an ice block.

“Oh come on!” Zach yelled at her.

“Oops.” She answered while she took a drag. The after-school buses flew into the parking lot with a thump and a screeching of gears and engines.

“Time to go.” Layla sing-songed as she distangled herself from her spot sitting between Will’s legs and carefully detached his arms from around her shoulders. The affection radiating off of them was hard to watch for anyone who was both cold and single at the same time.

Magenta shouldered her own bag, threw her cigarette down into the snow and took Layla’s offered arm so she wouldn’t go stumbling down the stairs. She returned Margo’s Marlboro lights and Harley Davidson lighter. Will piled up his books and took the stairs two at a time racing the girls to the bottom.

The fire-starter glanced at the silver lighter she was shoving into her pocket. “Nice lighter.” Margo looked at him and smiled. “Thanks.” He nodded and then swept past them all to get on his bus. He fingered the pages of the paperback he had held previously in his back pocket.

He found the fresh dog eared page where he had last left off on in the annotated and highlighted well worn book while he started his long-legged stroll towards the parking lot with his cigarette still hanging off his lip.

After retrieving her bag and three sets of gloves from the stairs she took up post to his right meandering a little behind to stare at Zach who kept yelling for someone to drag him to his bus and that his feet were numb.

“You wanna play the good guy?” She called softly to hothead’s back.

He didn’t say anything, he just flicked his fingers over his shoulder in Zach’s direction with a small glance to help navigate the path of concentrated fire.

The block of ice melted and Zach ran flip flopping over to Magenta to whine about how Warren had singed his sneakers. Margo swore she heard Peace mutter something about how even when he played the good guy someone always had to complain about the way he did it.

Margo wanted to answer with ‘style ain’t everything,’ just so he wouldn’t get moody about Zach’s lack of gratitude but he was already out of ear shot so instead she took one last drag and then tossed the stub of a cancer to her right into a snow pile. She climbed onto her bus with no thoughts other than her thankfulness that she was finally out of the cold.

The foreign accent came from the kitchen.

“I needed time to compose myself.” It was said with a bit of a smile and as a joke.

“We have to talk, and you have papers to sign.” Was the deadpanned response.

Margo shed her layers by the door, threw her boots across the foyer, and peeled off her wet socks. Walking into the kitchen she helped herself to the coffee that was already made.

The older, natural, blonde watched her cross to the table and sit down.

“So what else is there?”

“There are issues concerning your mother that need to be addressed.”

Margo’s marginally good mood faded. “What about ‘em?”

“She intended for you to become the interpreter of any medical situations concerning her once you were old enough to make the type of decisions necessary.”

Her stomach was twisting itself and her lungs were tight behind her ribs. “Shouldn’t that only happen when I turn eighteen?”

“Or until I decide otherwise. I am the primary interpreter until you are competent enough to make decisions for your mother. I know that you’re competent and I see no reason to dance around the issue.”

She felt like saying something harsh but didn’t have any words to put to the feeling. How was she supposed to make these decisions? How the hell was this her responsibility anyway?

“Are you going to sign it? You’re mother wanted you to be the one to make the decisions regarding her if something ever happened.”

Her grandmother was trying to convince her to sign on the stupid dotted line.

“Why didn’t she want you to make the decisions?”

She knew the answer, her mother hated Margo’s grandmother. It was her grandmother’s fault she became a scientist, and then a superhero or freak, depending on the way you looked at the situation.

Her mother and grandmother never had a good relationship, her mother was to inflexible and indecisive and her grandmother was condescending and haughty.

“She knew I wouldn’t make the decisions she wanted.”

“Well, what decisions did she want made?” She was almost afraid to ask. Margo glared across the table and white-knuckled her coffee mug.

“That information is only available to the primary care giver. You have to sign the paper to find out.”

“Manipulation isn’t nice.”

Her grandmother shrugged. “It gets things done.” She slid the paper across the table and pushed her chair out to go sit in the living room to read.

Margo signed on the dotted line. She went into the living room and put it in her grandmother’s lap.

Without looking up the older woman pointed to a manila envelope on the coffee table. “You don’t have to read it, I’ll tell you what it says.”

“Yeah. So tell me.” She answered with an edge.

Her grandmother looked over the edge of her book and gestured for Margo to sit down. She did. “Yeah?” The younger blonde prodded.

“You’re mother always thought she’d get blown up or die quickly but the situation she’s in now she didn’t take into account. We both know what she wants.”

Margo had looked away to stare at the file with ‘S.T.A.R. Labs’ stamped across the front in blue ink. It was bound to be full of medical files and hospital language for ‘…alive…’, ‘…might wake up but that’s fucking doubtful…’, and ‘…if does wake up will be stuck in a fish bowl and be PTSDing all over the fucking place, indefinitely…’

“She’s my child but she was right not to trust me. You can make the choices she wants, I can’t. It’s that simple.”

“I know.” She answered. “It’s not like they could do anything for her, they’d have to keep her in a tank until they can make synthetics for her. That’ll take years…” She paused “…and…brain activity doesn’t mean shit, dead people still have undecayed electrons and neurons zapping each other until the brain rots away.”

“This is true.” Her grandmother had been pretending to read the same page for the past five minutes.

“I’ll take care of it.” And then Margo got off the couch, she went to the front hallway to grabher bag. Over her shoulder Margo’s grandmother saw her granddaughter’s hand offering her a cigarette. The older woman took it and the flick of a lighter next to her ear made her turn to light up.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Yeah, I know. Now’s the excuse to start.” Margo lit and inhaled her own. Her grandmother made no move to put the cigarette to her lips, she just stared at it while blue smoked curled over her fingers. “The deed for the house is in your name, you can sell it if you want and buy something smaller. The will is taken care off. I’m packing tonight, my flight’s tomorrow morning at nine. I’m sorry I can’t stay for Christmas, I have interns that need to be supervised and projects to devote time to.”

“I have to look over the papers and files I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

Margo had grabbed the papers from off the table and added, “I’m going to have to go through all the procedures that the lab has set up for these type of situations, there’ll probably be an inquiry so they’ll want to talk to you. It’ll take about a month I guess, I’ll need help taking care of the funeral.”

Her grandmother took a long drag and held it in her lungs for longer than necessary. “Anything you need, I’ll come back from Norway as soon as you call.”

Margo climbed the stairs with her bag and the files, she made a show of closing her door loudly so her grandmother would know she was out of hearing range. Margo could imagine how her grandmother looked crying and smoking on the living room couch. It didn’t bother her as much as it should have, the situation wasn’t complicated, it was simple like her grandmother had said, the emotions made it complicated and Margo had just been thrown into the role of the decision making adult.

Who else was around to do it?

She could do what she had to do.

She would.

What she couldn’t do was comfort her grandmother’s guilt, how was she supposed to do that when she couldn’t feel any of her own. She missed her mother but she’d been gone a long time. Life was easier when people admitted the truth to themselves, Margo was eight when her mother didn’t come home one day and the nine years in-between that day and this one had already seen the grieving process.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

She was eight and in denial, she thought her mother could come back if some other superhero healed her, when they told her that it doesn’t work like that Margo had told them to try using a bunch of Band-Aids. She was nine and angry, she found out her mother wasn’t dead and they wouldn’t let Margo see her.

She was ten and turning eleven and she bargained with her grandmother. Her grandmother told her what had really happened and brought her to see her mother. She turned eleven and cried a lot and her powers got stronger, she was depressed and felt horrible that she was disgusted by what her mother looked like. Her mommy wasn’t pretty anymore, she wasn’t her mommy anymore, and it hurt to admit that she didn’t like mommy anymore.

She was twelve and she grew up, she stopped getting into fights and crying like a baby, she started to like her powers, and she stopped feeling bad for what happened to her mother and she stopped feeling betrayed by the thing that floated in a tank filled with salt water in the back of a S.T.A.R. lab facility.

Now she was seventeen and a bit too bitter, but she was smart enough to realize that there were plenty of other kids at school in a similar situation. She wanted to talk to someone but there was nothing she could think of to say that didn’t sound stupid or that really needed to be said to anyone but herself.

Kids with superheroes as parents grew up in different situations, they had different fears from other kids with normal, they had different things to accept when things went wrong, and they all got used to it because they had never known any other situation. None of those kids had ever known what normalcy was like because they had a different kind filled with parents who saved the day and a special phone line for “emergencies.”

She had an essay to write for class and lab reports to look over, she had nicotine to fall back on and the weekend to make phonecalls.

Instead of searching for a pen to write with, or smoking, or scanning official records about her mother, she dug in her bag for a scrap of papers with seven digits on it.

She dialed Magenta’s phone number. She picked up on the second ring.

“Hey snowball.” Caller id probably told her it was Margo since Magenta didn’t have telepathic powers.

“I’m bored and don’t feel like cooking.”

“Is that how you ask me to take you out to go eat?”

“Yep.”

“Yep.” Magenta mimicked her. “I planned on hanging with Zach but my parent’s haven’t gone food shopping and he can’t cook anything with what he has at his house so going out with you and having you pay for food seems like an  scratch addendum I can deal with.”

“You’re picking me up or paying for my gas.”

“Gimme directions. I’ll drive.”

“You know were Foxtrot is?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s the house with the green jeep in the driveway.”

“Good enough. You want me to bring Zach?”

“Do you want to bring Zach?” Margo already knew what her answer would be and she didn’t have telepathy either.

“Not really, he begged me to hang out and we did that yesterday a…-”

“…-and too much Zach is…-”

“Exactly. I’ll be there in twenty minutes and tell Zach it’s a girl’s night. You like Chinese?”

“I dig it.”

“Good. See ya when I get there.”

“Cool beans babycakes. Bye.”

Magenta hung up and Margo went to go change. She peeled off her wet sweater. Her wet jeans and long johns she took off at once, they stuck together in a inside out bundle of denim and whatever long johns were made out off. She left them in a puddling pile on the bedroom floor.

She went into the bathroom in her underwear and grey tank top to dig around in the medicine cabinet to find some Advil to take for her knees to stop hurting. They were fucked up, she didn’t have enough time to fix them but she would ace bandage them after she got home later. She went to the bathroom, flushed, and washed her hands. She flicked the light off on her way out.

There was a pile of clean laundry on the bed she didn’t remember making that morning. Her grandmother had been in her room, but in exchange for clean laundry it was an okay deal. She picked out and pulled on a pair of jeans with ratty cuffs, she was short and all her jeans looked like that at the bottom because she never took the time to cut or hem or roll them up.

She dug in her drawers for something with sleeves. She pulled on a navy blue shirt with the Global Guardians emblem on the right breast, it used to belong to someone else.

Margo found a pair of ugly cotton candy colored fuzzy socks that were warm and slide them on her cold feet. She put her hair a bun, it would be cold but her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed so she couldn’t wear it down. She brushed her teeth and turned off the bedroom light for a second time. She turned it off a third time after she decided to reapply her deodorant because she decided she smelled a bit funky from wearing all those winter layers.

From the stairs she called out. “I’m going out to eat. I’ll be home later.”

Her grandmother called from the living room. “I’ll see you when you get back.”

She threw on her jacket, gloves, hat, scarf, and slammed her feet into her boots. It was 4:30pm according to the clock on the stove, and the sun was already halfway down.

Margo didn’t feel like waiting inside with her grandmother, she opted for waiting outside for Magenta while she pushed snow off the hood of her jeep so she could sit on it without getting her jeans wet. Seven minutes later Magenta’s black Volvo pulled into the driveway.

Magenta didn’t say where they were going when they headed off into town, but Margo didn’t care as long as she wasn’t left alone to think.